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by will4274 1871 days ago
Alan Woodward seems to be the BBC's go-to person for scare quotes about the internet. In your article:

> "It's shocking," says Alan Woodward, a security expert based at the University of Surrey. "This is the Balkanisation of the internet happening in front of our eyes.

> "The US government has for a long time criticised other countries for controlling access to the internet… and now we see the Americans doing the same thing."

Previously, I saw Woodward giving bad information and engaging in unfounded speculation in an article about Signal - https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-55412230.

> Alan Woodward, a professor of computer science at Surrey University, said Signal was "one of the most secure, if not the most secure, messenger service publicly available".

> "Signal employs end-to-end encryption, but goes further than apps like WhatsApp by obscuring metadata - who talked to who when and for how long," he explained.

> "Cellebrite seem to have been able to recover the decryption key, which seems extraordinary as they are usually very well protected on modern mobile devices."

> He added that if this was indeed true, it was no surprise Cellebrite would have altered its blog.

> "I suspect someone in authority told them to, or they realised they may have provided enough detail to allow others - who don't just supply to law-enforcement agencies - to achieve the same result."

A good rule of thumb might be, if you see Alan Woodward quoted in support of the article, assume the author doesn't know any genuine experts.

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Is Senator Leahy a Republican?